GhostDeini the Great

Stuck between a best-of and a remix collection (featuring appearances by Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Clipse, Raekwon, and Ice Cube), GhostDeini the Great undercuts the strengths that would've been present in a disc devoted to one format or the other.

I wouldn't mind another Greatest Hits collection for Ghostface Killah. It's impossible to condense every facet of greatness he's been exhibiting since his top-billing debut Ironman into less than 80 minutes, but putting it together in a way that makes it clear how skilled he is as both a lyrically-knotted abstractionist (i.e. Supreme Clientele standout "Nutmeg") and a vividly cinematic narrator (Fishscale highlight "Shakey Dog") would at least be a fitting synopsis for his prolific career. We got what would've made a good first volume in 2003's Shaolin's Finest, but there were enough gaps and successive hits-- like the two aforementioned tracks-- to justify a second one.

And lord knows Ghost's got enough vault material-- mixtape tracks, remixes, rarities, whatever-- to make his studio album discography feel like it's only the surface of his work. The Hidden Darts series and 2008's The Wallabee Champ attest to that, and there's got to be more where those came from. Even with the guest stars and Theodore Unit members and truncated verses, Ghost's cutting-room floor material is typically high-quality enough to carry a pretty worthwhile album on its own.

But an almost arbitrary-looking and thrown-together mixture of rarities and hits from a man with no shortage of either isn't just something that'll automatically cohere, especially in this single-serving-focused download economy. GhostDeini the Great is stuck halfway between a best-of and a remix collection, and that undercuts the strengths that would've been present in a disc devoted to one format or the other. When only eight of a collection's 16 tracks are devoted to representing an artist's familiar favorites, it turns what would've been a traditional best-of collection's highlights into a series of perfunctory oh-yeah-that moments. When you've got three of Supreme Clientele's better tracks in close quarters during the middle stretch-- "Mighty Healthy", "Apollo Kids", and "Cher Chez La Ghost"-- the only thing that'll probably keep you from switching off GhostDeini and reaching for Clientele is the possibility that "All That I Got Is You" will make you reach for Ironman instead.

That problem wouldn't exist if you took the tracklisting and removed all the "(Remix)" notations at the end. A best-of that included the aforementioned tracks as well as "Run" and "Kilo" and "The Champ" and "Back Like That" would, paired with Shaolin's Finest, make for a suitable career overview of Ghostface's first 10 years as a marquee solo artist. But the remixes cloud things, and none of them are eclipsing the originals. It makes a hell of a lot of sense to throw Malice from the Clipse onto the remix of "Kilo", and even if he's short on his usual wordplay and botches a pop-culture reference pretty egregiously ("we was 300 deep like them Persian soldiers"), his voice sounds like titanium over that beat. But other tracks don't add much of anything, particularly Ice Cube's tossed-off guest spot on "Be Easy" ("I'm a killer with the chrome all in your face/ Blow your face back, turn you into a ghost"-- OK, we get it), and Kanye's phoned-in asterisk of a verse on "Back Like That". At least those have only one dude sticking their foot in the door; pushing "Run" to the six-minute mark with new verses from Raekwon (evocative: "I won't stop movin' 'til the metal ding me"), Freeway (jokey and hormonally distracted) and Lil' Wayne (sing-songing water-treading verses through a McDonald's drive-thru intercom) turns an agile sprint into a tiring marathon.

There's two all-new tracks, too-- "Ghostface Xmas", which provides the bizarre experience of hearing Ghost rap about eggnog and gingerbread men in the same ramped-up, breathless shout he uses for rapping about pushing keys, and the horn-driven, broad-shouldered high-roller CEO playboy swagger of "Slept on Tony", which sounds like it could've fit just as well on the soundtrack to Iron Man. Go ahead and cop these on iTunes if you want; they're fun listens. But anyone who buys this without owning Ironman,Supreme Clientele or Fishscaleis going to miss the bigger picture, and anyone who buys it while already owning those albums isn't gaining much at all.